elcome, new knight, to the Round Table of Bretonnia!

Okay, you've registered, but now you want to know how to set up your account. When you look at the 'knights' page, you see a black shield with a red question mark instead of a coat of arms. When you post a message, you don't get a picture (known as an 'avatar') next to your posting, nor do you get a signature at the bottom. You need to let the herald know your coat of arms and your avatar so he can display them correctly. Fortunately, this is all automated and is very simple to do.

In case you want to go ahead exploring the site and come back later for more infos, this page can be found in "About > First visit guidelines"!

Everything is controlled from your profile page. You reach this by clicking on 'Your Profile' under 'User Menu' in the menu bar on the left-hand side. At the top-right of the main panel here, you will see three links: 'Update Your Profile', 'Forum Settings' and 'Gallery User Panel'. At the top-left you will see that black shield with the red question mark again, underneath this is a link titles 'Update Your Heraldry'.

Update Your Profile

Let us start with 'Update Your Profile'. This brings up a page with four tabs: Contact Info (that you entered when you registered), Personal, Location and Warhammer. On the first tab (Contact Info) you can change your contact details or update your password. In 'Personal', you can add a webpage that will be visible from your profile, or tell people what your occupation is. In 'Location' you can tell people where you are. If you put in your town name and your latitude and longitude (in decimal degrees) from here, then your location will be displayed on the World Map, which you can find under 'location' in the 'knights' sub-menu in the menu-bar on the left side of the screen. Finally, in 'Warhammer' you can tell people the size of your Bretonnian army, what other Warhammer armies you play, and what other systems you play. When you're done with this, click the 'Update' button at the bottom to add these things to your profile.

Forum Settings

Next is 'Forum Settings'. Here you can choose how to view the forum in two ways: flat (like the Conclave of the Light Alliance or Chateau Montreford) or threaded (like the old forum at Earl Cadfael's). Which you prefer is up to you - at the Round Table of Bretonnia you can choose yourself rather than having the site owner decide for you! You can also choose whether to have the first or last post of a thread at the top.

Just below these settings is your signature. This can be up to 300 characters long, but should not exceed six lines in length. You can use 'BBcode' (the standard code for bulletin boards) in this signature - clicking 'help' at the top of the page will give you more information on how to use this.

Below the signature is 'Your Avatar'. This will probably say 'Not yet selected' and have a link labelled 'Select new Avatar'. Click on this link and you will be taken to the avatar selection page. Here you can choose an avatar of your own creation by uploading a file from your computer (this should be no larger than 100x100 pixels and 12 kB file size), or you can choose from the large gallery provided by the Round Table. The 'Default Gallery' contains images of knights, there are also smaller galleries for Dwarfs, Empire, High Elves, Ladies, Lizardmen, Wood Elves and Others (e.g. Chaos and Dark Elves). You can select an avatar from these galleries by choosing the gallery you want, selecting the radio button beneath the avatar you want, and clicking 'confirm choice' at the bottom. This will return you the the 'Forum Settings' page - now showing your chosen avatar. If you want to change it again, simply click 'Select new Avatar' again and choose a new one!

Gallery User Panel

Next is the 'Gallery User Panel'. This allows you to manage the pictures you have uploaded to the gallery and look at how many people are viewing them. You probably won't have any at this point, so we'll move swiftly on.

Update Your Heraldry

The 'Update Your Heraldry' link brings you to a file upload screen; you have considerably more room for your heraldry than you do for your avatar - 200 x 230 pixels and 100 kB file size. Don't worry if your image exceeds the dimensions - it will be automatically resized if it is too big. If you don't have any heraldry yet, then read some of the articles in the Heraldry section, or just ask on the discussion boards for advice on designing your own.
Best would be a. gif file with a transparent background. You can do that with the help of a graphics program, like the free available 'The Gimp'.

Now when you go back to the 'Knights' page you will see a small version of your heraldry proudly displayed next to your name on the roll of knights, clicking on it brings you to the larger version on your profile page.

You may want to add the small shield to your signature - you can do this by opening the small heraldry image (in most browsers you can do this by right-clicking then choosing 'view image' on the menu that appears) and copying its URL (the web address shown on your browser toolbar), then pasting this between [img] and [/img] tags in your signature on the 'Forum Settings' page. For aligning the image to the left with some Text next to it, use [imgl] and [/imgl] and add the text directly after the image. (the same with "imgr" for right)

Congratulations

You are now fully known to the heralds of the Round Table of Bretonnia. There's only one thing left to do, if you haven't done it already, come to the Great Hall and post there to introduce yourself!